Fictional Adaptation - Unit Briefing - 17/10/19

Today we were briefed on our next project, We had a choice between Fictional Adaptation and Professional Practice, I chose the former as I thought it would be a good chance to flex my creativity a little bit.

What is Adaptation? - When the written language is translated to the visual language.

Adaptation is all around is in television and films.
here are a few I can think of on the top of my head.

Marvel Comics
Iron Man
Hulk
Thor
Captain America
Dr Strange
Black Panther
Guardians of the Galaxy
Deadpool

DC Comics
Batman
Superman
Green Lantern
Suicide Squad

Sherlock Holmes

Biblical Stories

300

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Harry Potter

Lord of the Rings

Hobbit

Eragon

Green Hornet

The advantage of adapting an existing piece of work is that there is already an existing audience to watch it, and there is a lower risk for example with Harry Potter, there is already a large fanbase who are reading the books, this is almost a guaranteed market of millions of viewers as a large percentage will go and watch the film version of their favourite book.

There are however challanges and pitfalls about adapting a piece of work.

1) Translating the interior thoughts of a character from a written medium into a visual action, many books tell audience what the character is thinking at any given time. such as

"Harry sat on the bench and thought about whether to tell his friends or not"

Translating this into something the audience can understand from a visual standpoint is difficult.

2) Remaining Faithful to the material - This is very important as to not put off the audience, such as having a character who is noble and honest in the book be a liar and greedy in the films.

I think this is more important than people realise, I have watched several adapations in the past, some quite recently which are either completey different from the books or change key features.

For Example in the recent film Batman Vs Superman - They have both characters who never kill in the comics, killing people.

Or in the film - The Seventh Son, an adaptation of The Spooks Apprentice having the mentor character who in the books is very refined and self controlled being a degenerate alcoholic and having two of the main characters who are supposed to be 12-13 in the books being 18 so they can put a sex scene into the film twenty minutes in.

3) Not Alienating fans of the literature - it needs to be something someone who has never read the books before can understand, this is something the new Star Wars films is struggling with as many of the new fans of the series are people who have never watched the originals or prequels, this makes it difficult to put a reference in which only the people who have watched all the films understand.



You also need to think of the Writers intention? Why did they write this piece of work.

What was the main concept which informed their choices?

If you can aim for what the author aimed for to help guide your decisions when visualising the work.